We have a visualforce page that serves as a somewhat live dashboard for information in our salesforce instance. Through javascript and Javascript remoting (remote actions), we are polling salesforce for data every couple of minutes.

My question is around sessions and timeouts. Will these remote action invocations serve as "activity" and keep the session alive if there is no other user interaction on the page? I couldn't seem to find anything in the documentation that addressed this directly.

Ideally, we'd like to leave this page up all day without having the session time out.

I'm not really sure, but is it not that "Session Settings" that could be edited at "Setup > Security Controls > Session Settings"?
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mast0rDec 17 '12 at 14:27

In the session settings, you can set the timeout interval. Your session will auto-timeout if you hit that interval and the user has recorded no "activity". My questions is this: If your only activity is remote actions from Javascript, will you eventually timeout? Or does that remote action count as activity, thus, keeping your session alive?
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Kevin O'HaraDec 17 '12 at 14:38

Definitely the best way to test this question! From my experience the answer is YES, your session will be kept alive by polled RemoteAction invocations. However, I don't that each RemoteAction invocation resets Salesforce's session timeout JavaScript timer (which causes that annoying popup window to show up). So you might want to manually clear and reset that timeout.
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zachelrathDec 17 '12 at 17:31

Thanks for the clarification. I'll look into the Javascript timer and see if I can reset that.
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Kevin O'HaraDec 17 '12 at 18:36